Warm Greetings to our friends who are reading this.
It's been going onto 4 months now that our Patti vanished from our lives (30 Jan). Death is sort of like a silent "explosion" where something or someone disappears entirely, a radical change that occurs in the blink of an eye, the animating Spirit separating from and leaving the body behind.
Then there is that period afterwards where a kind of slow-motion fall-out ensues over the days, weeks, months in all the people who were close by and left behind with having to reconcile in various degrees all the internal conflicts that are always created after someone we care about... dies.
I suppose things are better now for all of us. Well of course things are better. Normalcy returns faster or slower relative to the degree of connectedness that one has to the deceased.
Things are better for me and I think I was standing closer than anyone when the event of Patti releasing that last breath occurred in the early morning hours.
I've reclaimed my familiar aloneness, or perhaps it has reclaimed me.
No matter, I miss her like crazy more often then not. Her picture and lock of hair ride with me on the dash of Ruby as though we still are driving quietly together.
I miss what we had for those quick four+ years of our two Spirits "dancing" the Main Dance of the Universe.
Often, I would ask her when we both knew she was on her way out, "We had fun didn't we..?" and she would always, always shake her head in the affirmative with a little smile and the look of love in her own eyes..
Two children of God.. often being so incredibly silly.
Best playmates being as stupid together as the circumstance and our own
spontaneous creativity would permit.
Being..dancing to the real but silent Music of the Cosmos, the essence of which is indeed Love. It's an experience that does not come to everyone in this life and I am the better for it although often in my aloneness I do not feel it to be so.
Still, such stuff of life tends to pass by too quickly. When it is gone there is a longing for it to "come back..", a longing for Love that can and often does occur even between old married couples after the flame changes its texture through the years, as it always does.. often becoming just so small, at times extinguishing itself like a candle run out of wax through no real fault of anyone.
Things happen, life happens.
Those who say we choose everything in our life must surely be choosing their own idiocy as well.
Change, diminishment and endings are always the greater part of life and to think they are not is delusional.
Then, after a time, renewal.
Well, perhaps renewal. Maybe renewal, but obviously not always. Sometimes when things die they are just dead and that's the end of that.
It is all such a mystery and faith must and does enter the picture at that boundary separating our experiences with our unknowingness
We carry on. We are carried on. Tears dry. Laughter returns, though sometimes not quite as hearty as before.
I've been back to the Iowa farm for nearly two weeks.
The old farmhouse required some serious cleaning of mouse poo and cobwebs and dust and I don't want to mention what else. (think raccoon and possum) I have had little time (that is, energy left from my work day) to post an entry here, so I'm giving it a whirl this evening, sitting here with the computer in front of the big picture window that my father installed into this old house some 55 years ago.
I feel somehow "contained" here, (not oppressively like being in a prison) but more so a sensation of protection in this place of my arising as though some part of me was still a little baby in my mother's arms and warmth, only now it is the house, the yard, the hills surrounding creating a kind of "bowl" of which I am down here in
the middle of it all.
I sense myself being cared for by even the land itself.
What a thing to feel, something I've never felt, nor will ever feel walking the busy, noisy streets of Washington, DC.
It is hard to explain. But it is here, right in the middle of all these hills of grass and grazing horses with their beautiful and frisky new-borns running all over the place in short spurts. It is among these acres and acres of newly planted fields of
corn and soybeans that I am able to "recharge my batteries" so to speak.
Being here never fails to "trickle-charge" my Spirit and regain my real strength which has more to do with spiritual stamina than muscle.
This little "postage stamp" of land in nearly the middle of American somehow envelopes me with care and always puts back the pieces of my occasionally
fractured soul.
It is doing that now.
Mowing the lawn.. re-screening the porch.. I've got some plumbing to do tomorrow. Then there's my continuing to put siding on the house..painting, replacing terribly worn shingles on the roof (well ok.. nobody likes to re-roof.. it is grinding, backbreaking work and no fun at all). I haven't started that project yet and am in no hurry to get to it, but I must, I really must before returning to that other world in Washington.
Renewal.. even coming in the form of simply washing all these windows so I may see clearly out and upon the world around me.
Speaking of renewal.. I have a "dead soldier" here and so will quit writing for now, crack open my 2nd beer for the evening and sit on the porch swing for awhile before putting together my evening meal. It's 7:30pm in DC..
Bob and Barbara are watching The News
Hour.. Margaret is probably zooming around in her BMW.. no telling what the rest of you are doing. No telling what Patti is doing. It is my pure hope that she and Skip are back with each other once again.
I just now noticed that there are ads being placed on Patti's Memorial slide show.
How crass is that?!
I need to find a different host for the slide show.
UPDATE: Thanks to Beth's generous offer to host the Memorial slide show on her own server, it is now ad-free, as it should and must be. Thanks again Beth.
Oh, one last thing to each and every one of you reading this:
In the spirit of staying connected to any of you who wish to stay connected to me, I am generating another "Bill (& Patti) Update" email listing for those wanting to be notified whenever I put on a new entry here. The Feedblitz notification system has not been working well after all and I have eliminated it entirely.
If you want to be on this new list-serve to be notified then you MUST send to me a request to be put on my (shit)list. I insist upon this and that includes
you, Barbara and Bob, and you Margaret, and you Brie and Josh and Judy and Tom and.. and... and anyone else who has just received the one-time email I sent out to you all today.
My email address is still bbouslaugh at yahoo which most of you have.
I never know when I'm going to put something new on, but I guarantee you there will be more to come. Now that my focus is no longer just taking care of Patti and I am once again out and about in the world, posting could be more often than it has been for the last year or so.
Let me know if you want to be on this new email listing.
If not, then hey.. do nothing.
:-)bill
